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January 20, 2006
Red Alert
by Soren Wuerth

A little march in a little school in a little town

     The staff was less than enthusiastic in advance of MLK Day.

     When I announced that I was planning to have a school-wide event, only one person spoke up in support of the idea. Otherwise, I was greeted with the normal response to my proposals:  dead quiet.

     By Friday, I had at least found half-hearted interest among the students. The principal gave a quick “sounds good to me.” So, with carte blanche approval, I scouted a route over the weekend and put flyers in teacher boxes, taking a little extra time to cut out a line of civil rights marchers from an old photo and juxtapose the demonstration over a photo of our school on the frozen tundra.

     During the weekend, a winter storm blew in, dropping the temperature to minus-40. Huge drifts crawled as high as eight feet up our front staircase. A block of snow pushed against the bottom of our door. When I woke Monday, the house was still shuddering from the blasting wind and I knew we would not be able to march outside, into the community, as planned.

     Still, without the threat of cancellation, the faculty knew something would go down that day. I primed students and staff by announcing “Happy Martin Luther King Day!” in the cheerful way a reveler lets in the New Year.

     I reminded students that in addition to being a federal holiday, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is observed by the Anchorage School District by allowing students and teachers to be paroled for a day.

     In class, we discussed a yellowed article I clipped out of the All-Alaska Weekly back in 1990 by Tom Gallagher, a UAF professor at the time: Understanding Racism: Seven Rungs On a Ladder. Gallagher “teased apart” different levels of racism.

     By drawing the ladder and filling in examples under each rung, I hoped students would dig beyond a superficial understanding of the problem. Examples leaped to mind—the manager of the bike shop (American Bicycle Mfg. Corp in St. Cloud, MN) who wouldn’t hire a candidate for a position when he heard the applicant was black. “Then the boys in the shop wouldn’t be able to tell any black jokes,” he told a friend of mine.

     I remembered the severe racism in my Anchorage high school—jocks yelling “Nagasaki! Hiroshima!” at Asian kids playing soccer. I warned the students that they would no doubt face discrimination in the big box stores they like to visit when in town, and that they would be profiled both as Alaska Natives and as youths.

     The do-gooder at rung six is guilty of being clumsy. I described a black man and a white man traveling together through a suburb in the rural South. The white guy points out a restaurant that is, obvious to the black man, a whites-only joint—clumsy racism. Then, just by being white, one belongs to a privileged class in our system: institutional racism, or “White Supremacy,” as one of my teaching texts calls it (this one written by African Americans, who know it).

     So ... on and so on until I spread some cardboard around for the students to make signs. Soon they were going full-steam on the project. After a class brainstorm, two girls carefully painted the MLK quote “Life’s most urgent question is, what are you doing for others” on a long red strip of poster-paper.

     The almost spiritual atmosphere that sign making produces was electric:  paint was spilled, a student scrolled through quotes on a computer, and another devoured the pages of a big MLK photo book searching for slogans.

     When it came time to march, our class went into the hallway and crowded around the red banner. The march became a stampede though the school as students from each wing joined in. A few of us tried to sing “We Shall Overcome” above the din.

     The march ended in the cafeteria, where more than 100 students, K-12, sang all four verses of the famous protest song. Some shared the meaning of their signs (Public Speaking 101), and we passed out just enough cookies to go around.

     Our little march was a boisterous, chaotic, and largely unsupervised—some might complain.

     But for an hour, racism, violence, hate and inequality felt utterly defeated; a new memory fresh and pure as a flowers was bursting through concrete.

     We the people ... still standing our ground.



Soren Wuerth is perhaps Alaska's best known community activist. He resides in an undisclosed location in rural Alaska and can be reached at soren@insurgent49.com.
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in-sur-gent (in sur'jent), n. 1. a member of a group which revolts against the policies of its leadership.